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Introducing the Moonwalk Hackathon

In my last blog I talked a little about what we call “Moonwalks”, and how they help us evolve innovative ideas that are shared across all our employees.

In the coming days, our 2016 CEO Summit will, no doubt, unearth some new topics for a Moonwalk. These topics will be decided by a vote of over 80 senior executives attending our UK-based event on the 11th/12th July. Our guests are coming from all over the world and represent all manner of business enterprises. This diversity is so important – for in my view, diversity is the catalyst for real innovation.

These CEOs will spend 24 hours learning about Artificial Intelligence from global thought leaders. They will explore how it can be deployed to make their businesses more successful and discuss their responsibilities to ensure harmony between man and smart machine to ensure responsible and empathetic adoption.

At the end of this event, the delegates will split into teams to form a Hackathon designed to create an intelligent machine that will generate lasting value for their business while guarding against a negative impact on work and workforces. The very best of those ideas will be the topic of our next Moonwalks at Tata Communications.

Personally, I am thrilled at prospect of being at the start of something completely new, that may well bring new value our business, to our client’s business and to the global community at large. And to be able to experiment with such a hugely topical theme.

The world’s media is full of stories about advances in AI from driverless cars to unbeatable champions at chess and Go. And just a couple of weeks ago the UK magazine ‘The New Scientist’ lead with a front cover which read: “When machines take over.”

This acceleration in AI is the result of rapid advances in writing AI algorithms coupled with applied neuroscience and the micro-tech required to create elegant robotics. And AI’s key enabler? The billions of bits of data that have been accumulated over the lifetime of the Internet and that continue to be gathered exponentially. This is where Tata Communications has the right to play in the AI game – our scale and global connectivity, cloud services and robust security.

At Tata Communications, we create the partnerships and provide the platform on which those partnerships can truly flourish.